English

An Application of the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck Process to Pairs Trading

Trading and Market Microstructure 2024-12-18 v1

Abstract

We conduct a preliminary analysis of a pairs trading strategy using the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) process to model stock price spreads. We compare this approach to a naive pairs trading strategy that uses a rolling window to calculate mean and standard deviation parameters. Our findings suggest that the OU model captures signals and trends effectively but underperforms the naive model on a risk-return basis, likely due to non-stationary pairs and parameter tuning limitations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2412.12458,
  title  = {An Application of the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck Process to Pairs Trading},
  author = {Jirat Suchato and Sean Wiryadi and Danran Chen and Ava Zhao and Michael Yue},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.12458},
  year   = {2024}
}